The Price of the Ticket

by Jim Nisbet

  Pauley said, “That’s stealing.”

  “Yes,” Horseknocker said. “At that time we were driving what they call a ‘mule’, a clapped-out tractor the Doormouse’s brother drove home every night from the plumbing supply warehouse he worked in. There wasn’t even a key to it, you started it by hooking the hot cable to the battery, which sat on a board where the passenger seat was supposed to be, and twisting some wires under the dash. But it was licensed. The warehousemen used it to move trailers full of pipes and sinks and shitters and such around the yard, and the foreman let Johnny-Tall take it home every night–that’s Doormouse’s big brother–on account Johnny-Tall didn’t have a ride and it was a long way by bus and the foreman was queer for Johnny-Tall.”

  Very little if anything ever happened in Horseknocker’s world that wasn’t inspired by homosexual sex. It was a tired, tired refrain. If Horseknocker were to come out of the closet himself, Pauley often wondered, would he postulate its existence any more emphatically?

  And, on the other hand, had Pauley been comprehending things the wrong way, all these years?

  He regarded the windshield bitterly. Not much argument there.

  The Toyota was about fifty yards away, now. Whoever had taken the load had taken the tie-down ropes, too.

  “His mother used to make him take her to Sunday Mass in it. Anyway, before you could say I’ll have a Seven-and-Seven with a twist we had the dead-man under that shiny load with air on and the stanchions cranked up. In twenty minutes we had her backed into a warehouse with the doors closed. A clean hit. The warehouse belonged to a guy called Frankie and Frankie had the biggest bolt-cutters you ever saw, the kind firemen use to cut through crashed subway doors to save commuter’s lives. Come to think of it, he probably stole them off a fire truck. Frankie made quick work of the padlock.

  “Man, we were just about retired, me and Doormouse. At that time, all I wanted was enough money to get out of Philly and head for California. I was still married then. I figured me and the wife could get a car, drive out to the coast, get a little place in Pismo or some other beach town, eat surf ‘n’ turf and smoke pot and get tanned and take it easy for a while.

  “Oh, we had it all figured. Doormouse was going to go back to night school, read a few books. He was a poet, you know.…”

  “A poet?”

  “Yeah, a poet.”

  “A poet.…”

  “Whattaya got somethin against culture? Go ahead, pick on them poor kids down in the ghetto.…”

  “You ever read any of his poems?”

  “What, you think I’m crazy? Poetry’s for faggots.”

  “Doormouse was queer?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “All right, forget it. So you had the loot spent before the lock came off. And yet nothing I know about you would indicate that you’ve ever in your life had two nickels to rub together. So what happened?”

  “Hell, even Frankie was jacked up. It was that trailer, you could hardly look straight at it in the dark, even, without your shades on, it was that bright. And if it was full of whiskey me and Doormouse wouldn’t hadda work for a year, no kidding.”

  “So what was in it, already. Bibles?”

  Horseknocker stopped mid-gesticulation. “How’d you know?”

  “Come on! What was in the truck?”

  “No, really. How’d you figure it out?”

  “Come off it, Horse.”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways. You ever had your chart done? You’re psychic. You know,” Horseknocker placed his hand on Pauley’s arm, “it’s a gift.”

  “Don’t touch me, Horse,” Pauley said quietly.

  Horseknocker sat back against the seat and watched the approaching Toyota for a moment. Then he said, “Shirts.”

  “Shirts?”

  “Gas station shirts.”

  “Gas station shirts?”

  Horseknocker nodded slowly, as if staring at the memory. “About ten thousand of them.”

  “This truck full of whiskey turned out to be a truck full of goddamn gas station shirts?”

  Horseknocker looked around. “You hear an echo in here?”

  Pauley tried to get a laugh going. What he got was a lonely sound, like a dime slowly spinning to a stop on a laminated counter in a deserted diner at 3 A.M. This sound passed for a laugh about like a dime passes for money.

  “The trucker must have picked up the load just to keep from going home empty. Except for size they were exactly alike, every one of them.”

  The Toyota was very close now.

  “Them guys,” Horseknocker moved his chin toward the empty Toyota, “are gonna be mighty disappointed.”

  Pauley wasn’t ready to generalize. “Ten thousand identical shirts.”

  “Navy blue with orange stripes. You didn’t like that style, you were shit out of luck.”

  Pauley shook his head vaguely. The Toyota was just ahead, and he hadn’t quite decided what to do when they got there.

  “What’d Frankie say?”

  “Get this cocksucking trailer out of my motherfucking warehouse and take your dick-loving asses with it. Words to that effect. Like it was our fault!”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Like Frankie said. We took the trailer out of his warehouse and parked it about a mile away, real neat-like. Very nerve-racking phase of the job, much worse than the actual heist. Sitting in the cab of that clapped-out mule dragging that stolen trailer was like having a neon arrow pointed at your asshole. You could see the logic to our position, though. We might have brought down a lot of heat on Frankie for nothing, and he regularly killed guys for fucking up a lot less.”

  “Why not you guys?”

  Horseknocker shrugged. “He must have been amused. It was pretty funny, after all. Frankie saw Doormouse’s face when we first got a look at the load. He looked like a kid that had reached into his Christmas stocking and come up with a fistful of dogshit. We all looked about the same though, Frankie included, standing at the trailer’s open doors looking at stacks and stacks of uniform shirts in boxes of ten. I didn’t say nothing. Nobody said nothing. You didn’t want to say nothing or laugh around a guy like Frankie, unless of course, he laughed first. Which he did.” Horseknocker shrugged. “So we all did.”

  The Jaguar suddenly swerved into the lane to their right, angling for San Jose. An older Datsun next to them screeched to a halt to avoid hitting it. Pauley and Horseknocker watched as the Datsun driver sagged behind his wheel, visibly shaken.

  “Some people just can’t handle the rigors of modern life,” Horseknocker observed. “The pussies.”

  “How did you know the shirts were all the same style?”

  “Frankie was the first to rally. He made us burrow way into the front of the load to make sure it was all shirts. Said people smuggled shit like that all the time. Said you can’t trust nobody from Jersey. He was hoping for a consolation prize, un-taxed cigarettes or something. But it was pretty easy to see what was going on. It wasn’t like it was a sophisticated problem or nothing. They were all the top half of a uniform, the kind of shirt a guy would wear to pump gas or work on cars or go to the pseudo-blue-collar homosexual night club in.” Horseknocker sighed. “Gas station shirts.”

  “Gas station shirts,” Pauley repeated dully. “That’s depressing.”

  Horseknocker stifled a laugh. “Not as depressing as a truck-load of torture racks.”

  “Stick to the subject,” said Pauley sharply.

  “Other than size the only difference between them was they each had a name stitched over the heart pocket. Strangely formal, too. There were hundreds of Ernests, Ralphs, Andrews, Jameses, Johns, Richards, and so forth. Thousands of them. But not a single Ernie, Jim, Jack, or Dick. No Frank, just Francis. A regular lonely hearts club. Very formal.”

  “All guys’ names, of course.”

  “Oh sure. Them guys are all queer, you know, that work in gas stations.…”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Chris
t. It’s been twenty-five years.”

  They were approaching the split. The Jaguar had obviously positioned itself to merge southbound on 101, to the right. Pauley gave the matter of commuting a moment’s thought. Whether they stopped at the Toyota or not they’d have to sooner or later get out of this traffic. The nearest exit was Seventh Street, eastbound after the split merged onto Interstate 80. If they went south at this rate they would spend another hour in traffic. East was the answer. He nosed the Chevy a few inches to the left.

  The Toyota was a car length away. The loss was going to cost him plenty. He had no insurance, of course. The invoice for four thousand dollars worth of torture racks had become a worthless piece of paper in his pocket. He could eat the labor–he would have to eat the labor–but he was out the hard costs of the materials, which came to about fifteen hundred dollars. With both rents being due, the cost of the lemon Toyota, job materials and miscellaneous bills, he was looking at immediate out-of-pocket expenditures of at least thirty-five hundred dollars. There were no funds stashed for such contingencies, and no fallback credit apparatus beckoning. Even if Celeste had taken on that miserable club job she’d gone off to look into today, he could see no way to climb easily out of this suddenly yawning sinkhole. His entire net worth was down to the forty bucks in his pocket and maybe two hundred in the checking account.

  They watched the Toyota’s slow approach, as if it were traveling backwards of its own accord.

  “So. So Frankie didn’t kill you.”

  Horseknocker had become fascinated by the approach of the dead Toyota as well. The effect was hypnotic. They had devoted most of the evening to getting here–for no reason whatsoever, as it turned out. It seemed likely that they were about to begin to devote the rest of the evening to getting away. Directly out the back window of the truck cab, Venus and a sliver of new moon had already declared their conjunction in the western sky, indigo far above a sunset of languidly molten tangerine, attended by the cirrus formations commonly called mare’s tails. Directly below these colors a rolling contusion of blue-gray fog ten miles wide and a hundred stories high had begun to spill over the coastal ridge, piling up its coolness against remnant pockets of the retreating day’s warmth before it boiled down the eastern slopes of Diamond Heights and Mount Davidson to inundate the city in headlong darkness.

  Pauley turned on the lights. Mother Mary glowed a dirty ochre.

  “No, he didn’t kill us. At least if he did, I didn’t hear about it.”

  “How come?”

  “Like I said. He thought it was funny. And besides, he was queer for Doormouse.”

  Pauley shook his head. The Toyota was now directly beside them.

  “Whew,” said Horseknocker. “What stinks?”

  Well-acquainted with the reek of scorched kefir, Pauley said nothing.

  “Hey, Pauley.”

  “What.”

  “You got a ticket.”

  Rectangles of white and yellow and pink paper fluttered under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side of the Toyota.

  “You mean Martin Seam got a ticket.”

  Horseknocker looked at him. “That the guy sold you the truck?”

  Pauley pulled a fistful of papers out of his shirt pocket. “He left the paperwork to me, and I haven’t sent it in yet. It’s still in his name, it’s still his truck.” He turned the papers in the air. The Affliction invoice fell onto the seat.

  “It’s still his six hundred dollars, too,” Horseknocker said, handing him the invoice.

  Pauley stuffed the useless papers back in his pocket.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  They didn’t stop.

  The Seventh Street exit was another three hundred yards beyond the split, off Highway 80 East, toward the Bay Bridge and Berkeley. It took them twenty-five minutes to cover the ground.

  If there had been a radio in the truck, and if they’d been listening to it, Horseknocker and Pauley might have heard about an accident on the bridge, just beyond Treasure Island, that had traffic backed up all the way past them and five or six miles south, to Candlestick Park. But for the first seven of these twenty-five minutes Pauley watched the reflection of the abandoned Toyota move across the Chevy’s right side mirror. Alternatively, they had a magnificent view through the windshield, as lights came on among the fog bank stealing between buildings in downtown San Francisco, beneath a twilight the color of a Douglas iris.

  Pauley resettled against the seat. His sacrum was on fire from levering his leg against the clutch.

  He drummed his fingers on the rim of the steering wheel.

  Five more minutes and fifty feet crawled by.

  “So, Horse,” he said finally. “How could you tell Frankie was queer for this guy Doormouse?”

  “You kidding me? All them wiseguys is queer. It’s a Catholic outing thing. The Jesuits make the neighborhood kids spend their puberty in dark confessionals kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. The light filtering through the grille outlines the guilt on their faces from jerking off, the priest starts whispering next door, all you can see is his lips moving through the grill, next thing the kid breaks down and tells all, the priest consoles him with a few threats, the kid starts to like it, and bingo, you got a budding queer.

  “It’s like I saw a thing in the paper the other day about this scientist. The guy scalps caterpillars, see. He lifts the tops of their heads off with a scalpel and exposes their brains to daylight. Then he puts the tops back on with epoxy or something and next day, couple days later–bingo, no matter what time of the year it is, he’s got butterflies. His whole lab’s full of them. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Them butterflies is queer. Every one of them.”

  “I’m sorry I asked.…”

  “I’m not kidding! It’s the same thing with the Jesuits and the little neighborhood kids. It’s you I’m telling! Them Jesuits know everything for centuries.…”

  “Listen, Horse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t you take anything seriously?”

  “What? You mean like homosexuality and the Catholic church?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Horseknocker studied Pauley for a full minute. The Chevy’s motor ticked asthmatically. For miles around them cars and trucks sat idling, quivering in their own fumes.

  Then he said, “Hey, Pauley. It’s only money, man. That’s all it is. Just money.”

  Chapter Twelve

  AND NOW PAULEY ENTERED A WORLD WHICH CONTAINED BUT three of the metropolitan area’s six million people.

  Nobody asked him whether or not he had the stomach for it.

  He traded Horseknocker a twenty-dollar bill for two fives in consideration of his time and dropped him back at The Gyre. Horseknocker tried to refuse the money. Pauley insisted. It wasn’t Horseknocker’s fault that the job had gone sour. Besides, what’s ten bucks to a man who’s just lost everything?

  While we’re on the subject, gringo, what kind of life is it, wherein it’s not the fall of an ax in battle, but a single misstep in working up the rent, that springs the latch on the pit?

  Some men revel in the poetry they imagine to exist in violence. While their idea of violence is equally imaginary, its poetry has little more sustenance for reality to chew on than a leaf of lettuce for Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  It’s a curious fact that when violence gets around to actually happening to the aloof beer-drinking connoisseur’s own body its poetry seems even less real than his imagined, armchair kind. It seems remote, trivial, disjoint, refutable, and the shock helps. Just before peaking, violence is at its most deniable. It seems ironic and wrong, a mistake being made elsewhere, then it’s over. The question isn’t, anymore, how much poetry is involved. The question isn’t even how such hurtful poetry can have happened at all. The question is, Why me? This is the thought on the staircase–if there is a staircase out of the pit, and thought clawing up it.

  We here theorize on a personal violence
, violence between a couple of people, between a pedestrian and a car, between two dogs, between an individual and a beast. Catastrophic violence is a different story, involving the whole community, where a consensus hallucination is evoked and everybody jumps in with the screaming, the running, the falling, and the dying.

  Pauley had seen plenty of the former brand of violence. It had been applied to him from an early age, and he had begun to apply it to others as soon as he got big enough. But although he’d learned to expect violence, he refused to acknowledge its effect on him. He developed a callus on his soul. On the other hand, violence seemed to work pretty well when he–or someone, or something–applied it to others. For sheer terror, violence between intimates works acceptably well. Violence between individuals unknown to one another works better. Violence depersonalized, perpetrated by a force, a system, or a mechanism whose impetus remains imperceptible to its victim, works best.

  That the environment had seen fit to even the score against his father on Pauley’s behalf was a kink in the philosophy, an anomaly, an unusual favor from the machinery, as marvelous as it was terrible. Beyond this one favor little else changed. About forty years later Pauley came around to thinking that the inanimate universe had been whaling on him long enough, and vice versa. Perhaps it had taken him that long to disabuse himself of the occasionalism of his father’s death: that Pauley’s imagined, hoped-for, earnestly desired revenge upon his cruel progenitor in some mysterious way wound the mainspring of the circumstances of the man’s demise. He no longer thought so. As a corollary, he no longer thought of his father’s death as somehow significant.